From time to time my father tells fishing stories from his childhood. About the battles with salmon and sea trout caught on pole in the Hardangerfjord, and the rowing trips where they hauled up kilos of salmon from nets. Despite the fact that as a child I was well above average interested in fishing, I soon gave up when salmon and sea trout became increasingly rare to catch on the hook. Today, there is about a greater chance of escaping farmed salmon than wild salmon, as we now have to call it, to distinguish it from its farmed cousin. My father can also say that almost every winter they could go skiing from home, all the way down from the fjord, to the rural mountains at 600-700 m above sea level. During my upbringing, winter was mostly only found on the valley sides and higher up. Today, climate change has led to far fewer days with snow. In some places, children grow up with artificial snow as a substitute for the original, or “wild snow”, a word that appeared in the late nineties. Our grandparents and great-grandparents can tell stories from a time when the wilderness was largely intact and continuous, without major man-made natural interventions such as cottage villages, motorways, energy plants, high-voltage power lines and forest roads. Wilderness, which around a hundred years ago made up around half of our country, today accounts for only 11.5 per cent. Where am I going with this romanticization of the natural memories of childhood? Yes, I want to show how each generation uses the nature you experienced as a child as a standard for what is normal. This psychological and social phenomenon is called “shifting baseline syndrome”, or in Norwegian, change blindness. Simply explained, it is a matter of collective amnesia. Because we lack memories and knowledge of what nature was like for the generations before us, the standard is gradually lowered for what we consider a healthy state for nature. At a time when the earth’s climate and ecosystems are being destroyed at an ever-increasing pace, blindness to change is a clear challenge for environmental policy and management. We humans use almost twice as much of the earth’s resources as in 1980. On as much as 75 percent of the earth’s land area, we have made changes to the natural vegetation. More species are at risk of extinction now than at any other time in human history. Loss of nature, extinction of species and climate change should provoke strong reactions and political action. But the blindness to change contributes to us not being able to take it in. The result is that we relate to the ongoing changes in nature as if they are just something that happens outside of our control, not the result of our own actions. The blindness to change is an invisible force that lurks, laughs and accepts itself in the shadows, while we destroy nature bit by bit. We tear up carbon-rich bogs to build even more cabins and larger motorways, cut down old natural forest and build down outdoor recreation areas. It’s just a bog, some old trees and a small forest. “We have so much nature that we have to put up with sacrificing a little”, it is often said, despite the fact that countless reports and the UN nature panel are warning. In the absence of adequate nature mapping and an overview of the ecosystem’s condition, and good tools to understand the cumulative effects of all area changes over time, we have rigged development in society according to a narrow set of values, where nature is always the loser. How can we counteract this collective amnesia allowing nature, our very national treasure, to disappear through our fingers? Today, the average European who is lucky enough to live to 100 will have spent 90 of those years indoors or in a vehicle. Urbanization and technological development have created a physical and mental distance from the living world around us. Nature, with which we were once so closely connected, has for many become a foreign backdrop that we no longer know or understand. To counteract the blindness to change, we need more contact with our natural surroundings. We must get to know nature as it is today, experience it and talk about it out loud. Don’t forget what we have, what we’ve had, but also not how we need nature to be in the future. An important first step to achieve this is to become aware of the collective memory loss we are facing as a society. Ask your parents and grandparents what their neighborhoods used to look like. Listen to the nature and outdoor life organisations, who know the local nature better than most. This is a call not least to the politicians who manage our nature. By becoming aware of the mistakes that have already been made, we can learn from them. I wonder which nature memories from my childhood I will share with my children, and which ones have already been lost to them? Hopefully together we can create new memories from a nature that does not belong to the past. An intact nature we can relive together, when they are adults and I am old.
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Nature is disappearing, but we can’t take it with us – Expression
